A Management System for Model-Oriented Course Outlines

Driven by requests from Internet-savvy students, a large number of universities and educational institutions have started to design, develop and use information and communication technology to create, share and disseminate instructional material. Commercial tools, such as Blackboard and WebCT, are available to offer basic course management functionalities. However, most of these tools are hindered by flaws that prevent sharing and publishing instructional material. For example, professors are generally provided with little assistance and deprived of models to develop the structure of their course outlines and they often prevent colleagues from sharing resources. Creating course outlines is indeed a laborious and complex task. The authors believe that a management system for electronic course outlines should be based on the management of models which enables users to create, adapt and modify course outline structures. This paper presents Course Zone, a modeloriented management system for course outlines developed at HEC Montreal.